Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Where Did The Universe Come From? Geraint Lewis (#232)

Episode Date: June 5, 2022

Do you ever look up to the stars and wonder about what is out there? Over the last few centuries, humans have successfully unraveled much of the language of the universe, exploring and defining formerly mysterious phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and matter through the beauty of mathematics. But some secrets remain beyond our realm of understanding—and seemingly beyond the very laws and theories we have relied on to make sense of the universe we inhabit. It is clear that the quantum, the world of atoms and electrons, is entwined with the cosmos, a universe of trillions of stars and galaxies...but exactly how these two extremes of human understanding interact remains a mystery. Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions allows readers to eavesdrop on a conversation between award-winning physicists Chris Ferrie and Geraint F. Lewis as they examine the universe through the two unifying and yet often contradictory lenses of classical physics and quantum mechanics, tackling questions such as: Where did the universe come from? Why do dying stars rip themselves apart Do black holes last forever? What is left for humans to discover? Geraint Lewis is a Welsh astrophysicist, who is best known for his work on dark energy, gravitational lensing and galactic cannibalism. Lewis is a Professor of Astrophysics (Teaching and Research) at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, part of the University of Sydney's School of Physics. He is head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Group. He was previously the Associate Head for Research at the School of Physics, and held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship between 2011 and 2015. Lewis won the 2016 Walter Boas Medal in recognition of excellence in research in Physics. I In April 2020, Geraint was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. He is also an elected fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. Please Visit our Sponsors LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Michael Saylor: https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Brown Graduate student receives PhD at age 90: https://bit.ly/3ziKRCo Brian's Horace Mann Medal announcement; stay tuned for my commencement speech https://bit.ly/38BuZQs A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think so, and I think it's good to be provocative, but that's what we wanted to do with the book is present those kinds of questions you could have about the universe. The Y questions, of course, are always somewhat dangerous questions to head into, but I think the way you can talk about is being based in physics, right? I mean, I want to understand the physical process by which our universe came into being. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another very special episode of the Into the Impossible Podcast. It is I, your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating at the University of California, San Diego. I am kind of still buzzing from a trip I got back from just recently. I took some of my family members with me, and I received, not an honorary degree, I received a medal, a medallion, from Brown University, which is my graduate alma mater,

where I received my master's and my PhD, about three decades and two decades ago, almost respectively. And to go back there, I was very moving, bittersweet in some ways, mostly sweet, very little bitterness, got to bring my kids, my wife, and show them a part of my life that they had never really seen before because they didn't know me when I was a starving, slender, young, handsome graduate student. No, they only met me much later. And I couldn't help it, but as all graduate commencement address E. Errs do, I guess I'm going to dress Err or not in see, I decided I would wax philosophical about what it was like to go through the transitions that I've gone through since the time that I left the Van Wiggled Gates and storied Providence,

Rhode Island. And some of it was recounted in previous visits there and in one of my books, but to actually be there viscerally amongst friends and graduates and other commencement speakers like the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and Shaggy, the phenomenal, renowned. and rap superstar of It Wasn't Knee, fame, who treated us all to a rousing rendition of his greatest hits. I thought that was kind of cool, and I was really glad that Nancy Pelosi didn't decide to rap along with Shaggy.

But it was really a wonderful experience, and I was really touched by the outpouring of positive emotions and feelings and everything that it felt to be back and to give advice to people. And I'll post my video of my commencement address to the graduate school. once they process it at Brown, they tell me that will happen at some point in the near future.

And I'll be sure to send you a link to it because I want to always keep you guys in mind as my family into the impossible family. That means so much to me. It's a little self-indulgent. I know as all these commencement addresses are. But hopefully you'll find it interesting because it really takes a synaptic view of life and of history and things that have influenced me over the decades. and what it means to be a scientist and to return to the place where I really became a scientist graduate school. To be amongst the presence of greatness, there was a graduate of Brown in physics, not in underwater basket weaving.

His name is Manfred Steiner, and he graduated from Brown at age 89. He earned his Ph.D. at age 89, but he received it at age 90, right in front of me at the ceremony at Brown last weekend. And to be there with him, could not resist giving him a standing ovation, which then erupted throughout the audience. And he really is a spectacular individual. He came to America after being born in pre-Nazi, Vienna, Austria, Germany. He already had a medical degree at age 23 and moved to the U.S. in Washington, D.C. And eventually he completed a biomedical engineering or perhaps another degree.

I believe it was at Brown as well. And that was accomplished when he was in his ripe young age of 45 or 50. And then throughout his career, he became a professor at the Brown University Albert Medical School. And he decided that he wanted to pursue his dream. And he says in an interview that even when I went to medical school, I went at times to lectures by renowned physicist. His lectures always fascinated me and was captive at quantum physics. and I wish I could go into more detail in this. But he said, I cannot do medicine,

and you cannot do medicine halfway. You have to dedicate your life to it. So physics was always a part of me, he said. When he retired for medicine, I was approaching age 70, I decided to enter the world of physics. So he started taking physics at MIT, 70 years old. He studied everything from the properties of subatomic particles. And eventually he entered the same classes and so forth that I was taking

with professors that I used to have, including Brad Martston, who is a professor of great renown, I remember. And it was really a treat for me. I didn't remember him for my time in the early 90s. Maybe he took some time off between age 70 and 90 in those 20 years. And it may have been that he actually wanted to, you know, kind of take it slow to really appreciate it. But one of my favorite lines from him, and you wouldn't expect this from a physician, he says, I could not imagine my life spent playing golf all the time. I wanted to do something that keeps my mind active. But as a matter of whatever you want to do, if you have a dream, follow it. Sometimes that dream may never be verbalized. It may be buried in the subconscious. But it's important not to waste your older days. There's a lot of brain power and older people. And I think that it can be of enormous benefit to younger generations. Older people have experience. And many times history repeats itself. So that was kind of a commencement address from Manfred. I'm hoping to get him on the podcast at some point. He's such a special individual and he has irresistible curiosity, which is the hallmark of a great scientist and the catchphrase of this channel on YouTube.

This audio essay is just for my listeners and podcast land and audio. You don't get to see my smiling face after coming down off this phenomenal high of being back at grad school. And one of my kids said to me that he wants to go to Brown and affectionately enter the dungeon, which is what we grad students used to call the graduate student bullpen, the first year graduate student offices, which are just desks where you might be, you know, come upon by a TA or have to do some of your TAing. And so it was quite a treat. And then to hear my kids thinking about wanting to even replicate the footsteps of their old man, who's trying to replicate the footsteps of another older man in terms of Manfred,

it was really delightful. And there's a lot of great things coming up in my life in this year, and I'm going to take you along for a ride in it. I'm actually going to be performing a wedding in the near future. That's right. Yours truly has become a minister in the Universal Life Church. It's a very, very difficult ordeal to get to become the ministerial studies, The theological seminary studies are very difficult.

But I did endeavor to do that, and I will talk more about that in a future episode. I'll also be talking a little bit more about fatherhood. As you know, I'm a father. I'm pretty proud of that. I'm one of my, if not my, greatest accomplishment. And, of course, that's thanks to my wife as well. But the special episode that I'm going to do this year is going to be with Richard Powers, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Overstory, which is a story about how trees and life on Earth unites us all.

I'm actually going to be talking about his subsequent book called Bewilderment, which is about astrophysics. He's such a wonderful human being, a true mensch. It's just a quality delight to talk to. So two years ago I spoke to Jim Simons about his life in mathematics and code breaking and finance and in philanthropy. And of course, he's the namesake of the Simon's Observatory. on my interview with Jim Simons in the back catalog. Last year I spoke to my PhD advisor at Brown, Peter Timby on Father's Day. He's kind of my academic father.

Of course, my father, James is no longer alive, and I miss him terribly, and I'll talk more about that melancholy emotion that I always feel when Father's Day rolls around. But this year, it'll be modulated by this wonderful man, Richard Powers, who's coming up in next week's episode. Or on the 19th, and I guess that's two weeks from today. if you're listening to this on Sunday when it's released. So today's episode is with a friend of mine, Garant or Gerant Lewis. Never know how to pronounce his name.

I always feel bad about it, but he's got kind of a last name for a first name, first name for a last name, but I love chatting with him. And Jaron's newest book, Where Did the Universe Come From, Our Universe, From the Quantum to the Cosmos, co-written by Chris Ferry, who's a wonderful writer, and I hope to get on the podcast at some point. He's written phenomenal books as well in the past. But Jarant as a two-time guest on the podcast, and he has been a professor in Australia for a long time, although you'll hear at the very end, he actually grew up the son of a coal miner in Wales, the UK. And I just found it so interesting that this man has been around the world as an enormously popular blog and as an author, as a scientist, and he came from extremely humble beginnings. He's really an inspiring person.

I didn't know it until we had this chat. And you would never guess that, not to speak ill of coal miners, but you don't really think of coal miners pondering me. ultimate origin and future of the cosmos. And yet, I believe his father did and at least inspired him too. And lo and behold, now he is an award-winning professor of cosmology, of physics, at the University of Sydney. And this book takes us on a journey from the deep past of the cosmos to the very future of the cosmos. And it really was time perfectly. This is my first time teaching in person in almost three years because of the COVID pandemic. I just finished today. I'm recording us on Friday, June 3rd. I'm wishing good luck to my students in Physics 162.

I actually just got off an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson for his Starcock YouTube channel and podcast. I'll inform you about that soon. And was kind enough to receive a benediction from the great Neil deGrasse Tyson to my students in physics 162 cosmology who are studying the origin and evolution of the universe. And today, so I showed them this video of Neil, wishing them a great chat of Neil. was too kind and complimented me beautifully, as you'll undoubtedly see if you subscribe to my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, which I hope you all will, because we do kind of like to do different things on the YouTube channel versus the podcast. I'm trying to explore different formats here, and I hope you'll give me some feedback. I know you're sick of me asking you to

leave a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to this, Spotify. It does really help, and it gives me the kind of courage to continue this project, and so that's all I really ask. You don't have to do much more for yours, truly, but But I do hope you'll subscribe and leave ratings and comments wherever you can. But today's episode with Jeryn really explored the deepest reasons why I became a cosmologist. And that's what I told my students, the very beginning of the course, a couple months back, at the very end of the course. And I closed the course today, the last day of class, we talked about inflation, quantum field that is thought to be responsible for the odd behavior of the universe as we see it, odd, and that it doesn't match what the standard Big Bang paradigm would predict. and so therefore it patches some of the holes in the Big Bang and brings up other problems too,

as you'll hear about undoubtedly in future episodes. And so my benediction to my class was that of Winston Churchill, who at one point in the World War II, I don't know exactly when, gave a famous speech in which he said, this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But as I told my cosmologist, it is perhaps the end of the beginning. And I know many of them are going on to graduate school, but many are not. And I said that this course hopefully has inspired you about the great majesty. and mystery of our cosmos and inspired you wherever you go.

You go and work for Amazon as a programmer or a delivery driver. I don't care. Just maintain your curiosity. Always be curious. A, B, C. And I hope that they will. And I hope that you will. And I hope that you'll continue to indulge me on these intellectual, possibly narcissistic,

flights of fancy. But I just love talking, as you guys had found out. And so I thought I'd talk a lot up front, then let the guest speak in our interview, let him speak for himself. And hopefully this new format will appeal to you. If it doesn't, let me know. My mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list.

And in upcoming episodes, you will be treated to multiple Nobel Prize winners, including my first non-physicist Nobel Prize winner, Guido Inbens, who is the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2021, but the sole recipient of the Harzman Medal of 2021. So I followed in his footsteps in one way. I don't know if I'll ever follow on another way, but he agreed to come on the podcast in the near future. And I can't wait to talk to him about the mathematics of economics and the

geometry of inflation, not the cosmic inflation that I close my course with, economic inflation that is ravaging the planet, unfortunately. And we'll get some insights from this wonderful Nobel Laureate. Bill Phillips, William Phillips, co-recipient Nobel Prize 1997 for laser cooling and trapping of atoms is coming on the show. Stay tuned for that Neil Turok, Anna Eges. These brilliant people, I'm so pleased to call friends. They're all coming up this summer. So stay tuned. Please do what you can to spread the word about the podcast. We've recently hit Top 10 in Apple Podcast, And we can only keep doing that if you guys play along and share the love, share the experience with other people.

And that's what I ask of you. So now I do indulge you to sit back and relax as we go deep into the universe, asking a question that humans have asked for millennia. Where did the universe come from? Let's go into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please help. Professor Jared Lewis, who is, I believe, an award-winning astrophysicist.

He is a professor of astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. Way, and I've been told, I had on somebody recently who was Australian. Actually, I have a few Australians that Brian Schmidt on. He's American. And then I had somebody else on, and I said, down under. And they said, you guys don't like that. Although you're not originally Australian, if I recall correctly. You're British, right?

I'm British. I've been in Australia now for the last 22 years, though. So I'm a citizen. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't mind the phrase down under. We are a long way from just about anywhere else. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I've noticed many, many times that, you know, it's the place that people most want to visit, but kind of put it on their bucket list for later after the pandemic subsides. May that come soon. And today we're on the podcast. You were last on way back in 2020 with your co-author. I believe he was your student, Luke Barnes. He was originally my master's student. So that was a long time ago.

And Luke and you were on last time for the Cosmic Revolutionaries Handbook. That was a lot of fun that book to read and to go over with you. We did a live stream. You guys can find that way back in the archives of the Into the Impossible Podcast. But today we're on to talk about this magnificent new book called. where did the universe come from? Which immediately, like Cosmic Revolutionary, the handbook, I think you're a master at titles. And we always like to begin conversations with authors with a segment that we call judging books by their covers. So we have now to do what you're

never supposed to do, which is to assess a toome by its plumage. Where does the title come from? And where does the cover image and illustration come from? And first, we should mention this was written with your co-author, Chris Ferry. Is that how you say his name? Yes, Chris Ferry, who's at the University of Technology in Sydney. Yeah, so like all these things, you know, titles and covers are now workshopped a lot, right, with your publisher. Because whatever your original title is, they talk to people and they sort of say, what grabs your attention? And as you know, this entire scientific book market is quite.

a busy marketplace these days. And I think that there's a feeling amongst the publishers is you've got to have a flashy cover. You've got to have an attractive plumage if you're going to get anybody to pick up the book. And I feel that when I go into a bookstore now and I just see the wall of science books, and even I stand there going, I don't even know where to start anymore. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose Google wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, a couple of years ago, the fad was to have very dark and ominous covers. This one's kind of dark, but not as dark as other covers. Your last book, Cosmic Revolution his handbook is bright with a fist raised in the air, anticipating, you know, kind of the reaction that many would have in delight raising and pumping their fist in the air. But this one is kind of evocative, maybe the galaxy, maybe some weird waveforms. And I guess I want to start with the title, although, yeah, as you say, you know, authors rarely have a chance to contribute to the cover art or the design. But sometimes they let us choose the title. But maybe,

in this case, the question I most have is that W question, a where question. I've heard said, you should never ask questions about that begin with Y, W-H-Y, in science. I never heard, you know, an opposition to using where, though. What does it mean where did the cosmos come from? Doesn't that presuppose there was a something, there was a time, there was a cosmos, pre-proto-cosmos, isn't this quite provocative to start a book with such a question? I think so. And I think it's good to be provocative. But that's what we wanted to do with the book is present those kinds of questions you could have about the universe.

The Y questions, of course, are always somewhat dangerous questions to head into. But I think the way you can talk about is being based in physics, right? I mean, I want to understand the physical process by which our universe came into being. Now, like many books that start with the question, doesn't necessarily mean we've got all the answers inside the cover. But of course, you know and your listeners know there's more than one single idea about where the universe came from and was there a before or was there a universe from nothing.

And we just wanted to bring some of those ideas in because the sort of central theme of the book is bringing together notions of cosmology, the large-scale universe with notions of quantum mechanics, which is often the small-scale universe. And of course, that where did the universe come from is tied up in the two of them somehow, and that's what we've still got to work out. And when I look at kind of some of the subheadings and the chapters, it's a small book. It's a dense book. It has lovely illustrations and a lot of good humor. And I think, you know,

it presupposes a lot of the questions that we as working, cosmologists get asked. And yet, it doesn't fully leave the reader with the sense that everything's known that could be known. In fact, there's a chapter that you entitled towards the end, do we know everything or will we ever stop running out of things to learn? Now, I never like to give away the ending of the book, especially when it's like a novel I had on Chris Hadfield, the astronaut who wrote a murder mystery. And, you know, that is really hard to interview somebody about a fiction. But here it's less, it's less controversial. So let me ask you, isn't it true that, as Wheeler said, you know, kind of the more that that island of

knowledge expands, the more the boundary, the coastline of ignorance also expands. But of course, area increases, you know, more rapidly than boundary. But are we learning more than we're, you know, revealing our ignorance about? Or are we really, you know, kind of losing the game against this infinite ocean of ignorance? Oh, I mean, that's such a, you know, such a tough question to answer. I mean, I am reasonably sure that, you know, that we will never, you know, put, stamp our fist on the table and say, right, we're done. Physics is done. We now know everything. Because even if we, you know, even if we get hold of that theory of everything that people have spoken about now for almost 100 years, right, there will still be so many questions

there to solve. So it's, we will not know everything, but I, I do feel confident that we will know more. I mean, that's definitely certain. But as you said, the shoreline of ignorance, that is going to continue to expand. And I have a feeling that some of the things that, you know, people say are outside the bounds of science today and a metaphysics, etc.,

those things are going to be drawn in. Questions of like, you know, what was before the universe? Are there other universes out there, etc.? They might become mainstream science down the road, but it's very hard to predict the future, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and especially, you know, that's a yogi bearer said it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Yeah. Now, some of these questions do have well-defined answers, and I think as scientists have learned more and more about different topics,

especially you think about life in the universe and so forth, which maybe we'll get a chance to get into. But certainly in the stellar astrophysics, the notion of the lifetime and the lifeline of stars, black holes, et cetera, these are becoming more and more precise and accurate as we develop. And yet, the more that we dig down deeper into the theme that really runs and resonates throughout this book is kind of this overarching notion of the quantum. And I don't know if that was intentional, but the book is kind of, it seems to me like, a primer, it's portraying and and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, into what we don't know, which is largely in the quantum realm. And there, I feel like, uh, it may be kind of hopeless, but, you know, is, you can hear any kind of quote that you like, but, you know, Richard Feynman, anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics, that, you know, doesn't understand quantum

mechanics. Um, and with the proliferation of books about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, different, uh, different, different schools of thinking of quantum mechanics needs to be really refined and understood before we can have quantum cosmology, quantum properties of black holes, for example. Do we first need to make basic bedrock advances in quantum theory that we teach to undergraduates before we can build onto it a scaffolding to go into applications in astrophiles? Yeah, so that is one area that I wanted to try and sort of stay away from slightly, was the overall interpretations, because we know that whilst there are varying interpretations, the mathematics works exceedingly well, right? But you have to let something go in your

sort of common sense to come up with a description of just what is really happening, what are the mathematics really describing. And I do feel that something, Something has to change somewhere with our overall philosophical understanding of quantum mechanics. I feel that people have been shouting at each other for many years about what the right interpretation is. I actually just went and reread an old book by John Gribbin called In Search of Schrodinger's Kittens. I'm not sure if you've read that way. Yeah, I remember that. I don't know if I read it, yeah.

But the final couple of chapters settles on this description. of quantum mechanics, which comes from Feynman and Wheeler, of course, the transactional idea, where essentially quantum mechanics works because signals are sent backwards and forwards in time, right? There isn't just this forward propagation, things talk through time. And of course, the mathematics, all works, etc. But that interpretation just makes everybody feel really uncomfortable. It doesn't sound right that you get signals travelling through time. But the universe doesn't care about what we feel is right, right? It's just the way that it works. And I still don't know what needs to be done, though, for one interpretation to be separated from another to say that this is the better description of

quantum mechanics. But I do feel like something needs to happen. Even though it's very, very successful, something's waiting in the wings that will change the way quantum mechanics will be thought about and applied. So we will get towards that theory of everything, such that we can talk about, the quantum aspects of black holes, the quantum aspects of the birth of the universe, etc., those things which are currently hidden from us. Yeah, and sometimes I push back, you know, as I will with you with respect and dignity that you deserve, but even with Roger Penrose and I'll say, look, the only times we talk about things where we need a quantum theory of gravity have to do with, you know,

singularities in black holes and the origin of the universe if there was a singularity which many people dispute, including Sir Roger, right? So what do you say to people like that? that, yes, there is a great hope that, you know, we can unify quantum mechanics and gravity, but there's no letter from God or from Zeus or, I don't know, whoever, from Oz. I don't know, there's no letter that guarantees that we have to unify them. So do you feel like, you know, there is kind of an overabundance of these, you know, theories of everything, unification, there's half a dozen or more that I can point to just on my channel alone?

But, you know, is that really, you know, kind of the richness, is it an overabundance of riches in that one aspect of physics versus devoting it to all the quantitative, you know, there's no need for, you know, quantum thermodynamics or, you know, some new interpretation of thermodynamics, you know, works quite well and it's featured in the book. So do we have an oversupply and under demand for these theories of everything? Oh, so again, I think I'm going to tread carefully here, right? Because I think, I actually think there's a couple of things with a theory of everything, right? So, firstly, there would be the personal satisfaction that we could crack that problem, if it can be cracked. We don't even know if there really is a theory of everything, right? But if we were, no, physics would sort of go, oh, yeah, look at how smart we are. We've actually worked this out. But, you know, as you said, there are, you know, there's more than one contender on the table for a theory of everything.

But in terms of the physics effort worldwide, you know, this makes up a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a percent of the effort. Most physicists around the world are solid state physicists, etc., working on practical problems every day. They probably don't think about or even need a theory of everything. So I don't think we're putting in a huge effort into that area. I think that area gets a lot more attention from the media. then the effort actually generates. But of course, one of the other things is if we get this theory of everything, right, if it exists and we do say, oh, I now understand the center of a black hole,

and I now understand the start of the universe, that doesn't mean that it won't open other doors to our understanding about what's going on in the universe, right? We have this overall picture about, let's just take cosmology, right? Standard cosmology written in the language of Einstein's general theory of relativity. And as cosmologists, we use this stuff every day, calculate distances, red shifts. We're all happy with it. And we know that it can't be complete because there isn't quantum mechanics in there. And we have mysteries out there. And some people have claimed, right, that dark energy and dark matter is the fact that we've got relativity wrong, that we are missing something of relativity.

I'm not in that particular camp, but there is a vocal group who are. And if we have that overall theory, we should be able to say whether or not dark energy is an illusion because we've forgotten something quantum mechanical in cosmology or if it's a substance is out there in the universe that we should go hunted for. So there should be other questions that we can solve, hopefully. But again, we're trying to predict the future here and we know how difficult that is. Right. So one of the themes that runs through the book has to do is symmetries and kind of guiding principles. but where I often, you know, find the subject matter sort of lacking is that we really care about the broken symmetries. As you point out in the book, you and Chris point out that, you know,

we're, they're perfect symmetries, you know, we wouldn't be here. Almost any, every symmetry has the capability for being perfect. And yet, if any of them were, I think, we wouldn't be here. So let's take matter, antimatter, you know, symmetry. And there is a, you know, thank you. apart per billion level asymmetry. Again, we believe we're made of matter, but that's arbitrary. We could call ourselves matter, but we're really anti-matter. It doesn't matter. No pun intended. The opposite symmetry isn't perfect. You had a nice Twitter thread that I kind of used in one of my video, solo videos on my YouTube channel, about the maximal violation of CP violation. I think you go through it in the book, and I wonder if you could take the readers through it as well.

What is CP violation? What does it mean that it's violated, unlike, say, electric charge, which we don't believe is violated? We think there's symmetry between positive and negative charges and locally between manner and antimatter. But what is violated? What is CP violation? And why is it so important both to our existence, but also guiding principles in physics

in general? Yeah. So, yeah, so this is, again, the symmetries thing, I think this is. one of the most beautiful things in physics, which most students don't get to see until their later university years. And even when I first encountered symmetries and breaking symmetries and all the kind of stuff, it didn't really hit me about what was being said here. And it was only a long time after that that I suddenly realize how important this is. You know, you get to Nurtus theorem and you suddenly go, that's why something's conserved. Now I understand that. So you've got, you've got

our universe, you have stuff in it and you can ask about doing particular transformations, right, so symmetry transformations. So, you know, you can replace, you can take all the positive charges and make them negative, take all the negative charges and make them positive. And you'd sort of think, right, everything should work out to be the same, right? We've arbitrarily labeled positive and negative. Everything should work out to be the same, right? So with electromagnetism, that doesn't really matter. Also with gravity and the strong force, perfectly happy when it comes to flipping around charges, etc.

The one where things get really weird is, so the C in CP symmetry is charge symmetry, if I change positives negative. The one where things get really weird is the P, which is known as parity violation, right? So we're talking about another symmetry. And again, this was all done in the 1950. And I think it's a huge disservice to physics that we don't talk about this a lot more.

It's that the work that was done by Yang and Lee in terms of the theory and Wu in terms of the experimentation. So essentially, all parity violation is, you say to yourself, I look at the universe around me. It's all behaving the way it is. And if I imagine that instead, I was looking at the universe, but viewed in a mirror. So I'm just watching a mirror flip. you would expect that the view that you see in the mirror would be perfectly fine. It would all be very happy. And you would say, right, everything that's going on in the mirror that I can expect to see that in this universe. Except when it comes to one of the fundamental forces of nature, and that's the weak force. So the weak force is, you know, it's in there in the mix of strong electromagnetism and weak. And so there the quantum forces. And you also have gravity. And what Yang and Li, basically suggested is that they've looked at all the evidence for weak interactions and they said, well, it doesn't, you know, the weak force doesn't seem to need to obey this parity symmetry.

I, if I have an electromagnetic interaction and I look at it and I look at it in a mirror, both are physically things that can occur. But if I take a weak interaction and I look at it in a mirror, the version of the version that I see in a mirror is something that doesn't actually occur in our universe. And this is what Wu showed in her famous experiments is that she was looking at the decay of, I think it's cobalt into nickel, right? So it spits out an electron or a positron. So it's a weak sort of process. So what you get is you get your big nucleus spinning. You go ahead, spins in a certain direction. And it tends to spit the electron out in a certain direction. And a neutrino comes out in the other

direction. And when you look at that in the mirror, that's not something that occurs in our universe. So the weak force basically breaks that parity violation. That's it breaks that parity symmetry. And again, that's rather earth-shattering because in your mind, why should the universe know about whether or not something has an acceptable view in a mirror or not? Essentially what you're saying is that the universe knows its rights from its left, which sees, It seems very weird when you think about it. So, you know, there was a hope that if you had a charge symmetry and a charge transformation and a parity transformation, that that would give you back a view of things that occur in

this universe. So not only do I look in the mirror, but I change on the positive signs to negative signs, etc. That should get me back to what I see in this universe. Right. A simple example, it would be a wire that. that has current flowing through it, if you reverse the charges,

so now it's electrons are running instead of protons, protons are running through it instead of electrons, but you also have to reverse the direction that those objects are traveling, you'll get the same amount of charge traveling per unit time. That's right. So everything then works out. But of course, then there are experiments

that people have done now to show that that combination of C and P together, and the experiments are kind of involved, but when you sit down and you work through them, you sort of find that even that C and P are violated in certain experiments. And again, you have to wonder, why is the universe fractured in that way? Right. There's a fracture in there, and it's written somewhere into the laws of physics.

It didn't have to be there. The universe could be perfectly symmetric in that particular two quantities. And now, of course, there's a hope that it's a charge transformation, a parity transformation. and the time transformation, so you flip everything in terms of time, that that will restore everything in terms of what I see in my mirror and what I see in the universe. But it's not guaranteed, right? It's not guaranteed. There's a hope that C-P-T is going to be perfectly symmetric. And I think it's what, you know, we are almost headed off into the realms of that metaphysical area, right? You know, why is the universe this way? But to me, it is a somewhat

uncomfortable kind of thing. In that, we know, as you said at the start, if our universe was perfectly symmetric, so it was born with no matter at all, we wouldn't be here. Okay? So there's a one part in a billion that a symmetry between matter and antimatter that allows us to be here. If that difference of one part in a billion was also there in charge conservation, the universe would be a complete mess, right? If charge could appear and disappear at random around the universe, you know, things would be highly chaotic. So why is charge perfectly symmetric and matter slightly fractured? And we just don't know the answers. We can write turns into our equations, but we don't know why it's that way. Yeah. Exactly. So it's so fascinating about these, you know,

broken symmetries is that in the case of matter, anti-matter, as you just said, you know, if there are equal amounts, we wouldn't be here. And the amount of violation, is incredibly small, and that allows us to be here. And we can ask, well, what if it was, you know, even more maximally violated, we would get to the standpoint that we, you know, we may not exist either. In other words, it's dangerous to invoke things like, you know, anthropic or existence proofs, but the fact that we exist has to be taken to account when assessing some of the likelihood of these laws to actually be valid. Now, in the case of the parity violation, in your string of tweets that kind of motivated me to include in my video about Madam Wu,

Shinsen Wu's, a famous experiment that validated, you know, less than a few weeks after Yang and Lee came up with this prediction. I'll have a link to the video up here somewhere. But that I go into talk about that parody is violated maximally. And you go into detail as to why that is. I wonder if you could recapitulate that for the listeners. What does it mean to be maximally violated? Well, so it's not just a subtle effect, right? When you look at the weak interaction, it's just blatant.

It's not like you look in the mirror, and it's one in a billion events, looks like it doesn't obey parity. It's every single time. So when I take my mirror view of the universe and look at the weak interaction, It always disagrees with what I see in my universe. So it could have been subtle, right? It could have been so subtle that it could have been just one decay in a billion would look weird. But it's not.

It's every single one of them. So again, why is parity violated at that particular level? And again, where is this written into the fabric of the universe? Where is it? Where does the universe need to know that? it definitely has a right and definitely has a less, not a little bit right and a little bit left, but definitely right, definitely left.

So it is, it is, again, one of those deep mysteries that does bother me somebody, it keeps me awake at night. Yeah, it is fascinating, and at some level rely on these particles, which you also talk about in the book, these neutrinos, and how stunningly important they are, even though by far a million times less mass.

than the most massive or least massive other particle, the electron. And I always get kind of tired of it, you know, like Carl Sagan saying things like, as much as I love Carl and respect him. I've had his widow Andrewian on the podcast, his daughter, Sasha Sagan on the podcast. So I have a most respect. What do you say things like, oh, you look into the cosmos and see how insignificant we are? And, you know, so what size scale would we be important? Like, is Jupiter important?

Is a neutron star? Like, what level of size do we have to be? if, as you point out, neutrinos are these insignificant ghost particles, and yet they play this inordinate amount of a role in our, in their composition of our universe. So maybe can you wax poetically about what neutrinos mean to you in the cosmos, including these symmetry principles, which they seemingly uniquely reveal? Yeah. So, yeah, neutrinos, again, my deep down sort of wish about the universe is that really that neutrinos hold the key. That they, even though they are seemingly inconsequential particles,

there's something about the neutrino, which is ten or something deep about the universe. So you mentioned about parity being maximally violated, right? So we know that we have lots of different kinds of particles in the universe, and the neutrino is not that dissimilar to the photon, the particle of light. The neutrino's got a teeny bit of mass, the photon's got no mass. But the photon also has spin, and a photon can spin this way and it can spin that way. Perfectly fine. It's symmetric in terms of its parity, right?

You look at a photon in the mirror, it's spinning the opposite direction. That's fine. I've got photons like that in the universe. Neutrinos, though, always spin the same way. So, and I can never, I make it the right-hand lectures. I'll teach you how, journey, you ready? Yeah. So light, you know that the double helix, which we'll get to in a minute, DNA is life, right?

Life is always right. Life is always right. Okay. And then neutrinos are always the opposite of life. So neutrinos are only left-handed neutrinos and right-handed antinitrinos, and DNA is only right, and there is no left-handed DNA. Go ahead. That's my helpful mononic to teach you one of my favorite professors. So I feel good now. Okay, good.

So the reason that Wu's experiment showed the result that it did is that neutrinos are always born left-handed. They're always born with the same spin. And again, you can ask yourself what tells them when they're born that they all have to spin in this particular direction and all anti-nutrinos spin in the opposite direction? And it's somewhere there in the weak interaction. What we've had to do with our mathematics is we've basically had to write that in. We've had to write that all neutrinos are left-handed, all anti-nutrinos are right-handed. But that spin gives a definite handiness to the universe, right? It does imprint a handiness because everybody would agree that all neutrinos are spinning the same way.

And there have been links between the spin of the neutrino and us being alive here on the planet, right? because we are handed creatures, right? Our molecules tend to have a preferred handedness to them. And so you can have a molecule which is, looks like this, and you can have the same molecules, same atoms, etc., but the mirror image of it, and your body will use one, and it will ignore the other because you are built out of molecules with a handedness.

And people have suggested that the reason that we have this handiness to our molecules is due to the weak interaction occurring somewhere in the earth, early universe or in the early life of the earth that basically twists molecules in a certain way lots of hand-waving involved in all of this but we might be here living the way that we are living because of this fundamental aspect of the universe that it knows right from left which is i made a video about that too i'll put that link over here somewhere too yeah the life and and the weakened direction yeah it's an intriguing story and again you know my hope is that at some level there's some truth in that. Of course, there are lots of people that don't like to tie fundamental

physics to life in that manner, and there's lots of things about whether it was polarization in early star form in regions, et cetera. But I do like the notion that we are essentially the weak force writ large at some level, right? Right. And that the weak force is responsible for us living. And again, it's also kind of maximally violated in that we only see one form of DNA and we only see one form of neutrino. So yes, but, you know, it's dangerous equating, you know, two things that are equal except for those that banish or something like that, all banishing, all zeros are equivalent. So getting back into the book, what's so, you know, kind of delightful to me is that it kind of picks up in some sense, you know, where the previous book left off. In other

words, the last time you were kind of concerned with, well, somebody writes to you or to me it says, you know, Professor, I've got this great idea and, you know, the way the universe is born and it doesn't involve any of the known laws of physics and I'll share my Nobel Prize with you, Professor Lewis, but you've got to help me with the math and, et cetera. And then you see you come up with this rubric or, you know, which you refer back to Michael Keyes and his paper systemizing the theoretical virtues. I wonder if you could do the same, you know, for some of the more speculative things that you talk about in the book, such as the theory of everything, such as entanglement and the kind of more speculative aspects of physics.

Where would these fare as a cosmic revolutionary? How would this book fare against the previous book? Well, okay, so the goal of this book, of course, was to try and present how we actually understand how things work, right? So there are various complicated things that occur in the universe where you have gravity and quantum mechanics and they're doing their stuff to make things like stars and the expanding universe, etc. What we didn't want to do in too much detail in the book, though, is go into how we know those things are the best description, right? We didn't want to write a history of the development of modern theory of stellar evolution, etc. because that's already been done.

So this was to tell people, this is how we understand things work at the moment with the theories that we have. But as you mentioned, we wanted also get across that the story isn't over. We haven't got all the answers yet. So at some level, I guess there is a bit of an invitation in there for people to think about, oh, what would be the next step. But what I would hope is that they would go back to our previous book and understand that if they do have a new idea,

that there's a process by which you go through if your idea is scientific for it to, you know, have an impact on the community rather than writing statistically to various professors offering shares of Nobel prizes. And I kind of could comment on with that is always this question of, you know, who is doing what? You know, so you're asking, someone's asking, where do the universe come from? You know, can it be answered? Can it not be answered? We had Paul Davies on recently about what's eating the universe. We've had on Mary Olivia, off of why, you know, so all these questions, right, but those always presuppose some kind of consciousness and some sort of entity. And even, you know, notwithstanding the difficulties of quantum mechanical interpretation, still, the notion

of consciousness and its role with regard to, can we recognize the theory of everything? I've heard people say, you know, if we, if life existed in the universe, Paul talks about the shadow biosphere and things like that. You know, maybe it's right in front of our face. Maybe we have it already. Is there any danger? Like, do we have, like, just an impediment to possibly not seeing, you know, answers to certain questions because we don't understand the role of this ultimate observer, this three-pound supercomputer, you know, in our heads, the role of consciousness? Or is, can we divorce consciousness from, you know, the observer from the observed? And then, you know, in so doing, answer these questions, these ultimate existential questions.

This is something that I've churned over in my mind a lot in the last couple of years. So the supercomputer in your head, we've come an awfully long way in the last few tens of thousands of years, right? And at some level, it is rather astonishing that this brain that essentially evolved originally in Africa to live on the plains and then has gone around the world, etc. But, you know, it's there for our survival, right? So Charlie Lineweaver, ANU, has spoken about this thing. Is intelligence an evolutionary goal? And he basically says, no, you know, we are a fluke, right? We became intelligent because it helped us to survive.

But that doesn't explain why we then could turn that intelligence to the universe and ask questions like, where did the universe come from? That's not really helping us in the survival thing. And we've done that in the last few tens of thousands of years. My worry is, of course, there's a couple of things. Number one is that we have to, at some level, appreciate that there is a limited compute power up there. Right. So you can never, you'll never outthink a true supercomputer in terms of raw calculations. But there is another ingredient, the consciousness, the ability to come up with new and novel ideas.

And people are questioning whether, you know, artificial intelligence is going to have that ability. If artificial intelligence is ever going to have the ability to come up with something new, or will everything artificial intelligence do just be built on a theme that's been fed into it kind of thing? And I really, I really don't know. I've seen arguments both ways. But one of the arguments that does sort of freak me out slightly is this question of, If we do get a really smart AI, and it does come up with, no, the next level theory, that we will not understand it, right? Whether we will just not be able to comprehend what we are being told.

This is not a new thing, right? We've had this problem with computers in the past, in the sense that computers come up with solutions to problems, and we look at them and we just go, where did this solution come from, and even how does it work? You know, how does the solution actually work? And it's only going to become murkier and murkier as the problems become more complicated and complex, etc. So, yeah, we might have a computer that solves everything, and we just might not understand what it's telling us. And again, what do we do at that point? It might just look like gibberish to us, but it might be the theory of everything. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

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Yeah. Yeah, I've had some, you know, kind of thoughts about that. I don't know if you've heard my spiels, but, you know, kind of the AI Einstein, you know, AI Galileo, I always have to have my finger puppets. You'll remember these guys. It's not Einstein guys. So Einstein, I'm sure you've heard the story that he called the realization that someone in Freefall would experience no gravitational force. He called that the happiest thought. thought of his life. And of course, that led to the underpinnings of a, you know, weak equivalence principle. And from that comes GR when you're married to special relativity and a lot of differential geometry and other cool things. When we talk about that, though, it's not clear that an artificial intelligent agent could, A, have a happy thought. What does that even mean? And then, B, you know, visualize, you know, this free fall experience, which is, you know, kind of extra sense. and kind of, you know, revolves around a lot of experiential, almost wisdom, which by definition, I don't think silicon agents can have or even, you know, quantum, you know, Bose Einstein

condensate computers could have or whatever you have. So the one sense, I'm not, I'm more pessimistic about AI physicists, but I do share one thing in resonance with what you just said, which is, you know, could we recognize it or distinguish from gibberish? So thinking about that question, I've often heard it said, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was a guest on the show, and hopefully it would be back again. So, you know, he says, like, well, you know, if you don't believe in science, whatever that means, you know, like, well, you're using a transistor right now, you know, like you're talking to me on Zoom or, you know, Zencast or whatever.

You're using an iPhone. You're like, so you don't trust the same people that looked into the laws of quantum mechanics and made that transistor, but now you think they're going to lie to you about X, Y, or Z. And I always have to kind of push back on it because I don't think anybody look, if you've ever seen the pictures of the first transistor, you know, Bardeen and Shockley and, and others, not Cooper, I'm backing on the third guy. But anyway, they invented the transistor. You know, it's like chewing gum and a coat hanger and a big piece of silicon. And it looks nothing like, you know, what you'd see. And, you know, Schrodinger's equation now tells you what the, you know, how this device is going to perform. No, it's built. from experimentation. Similarly, people will say, well, thanks to Einstein and E equals MC squared, we unlock the power of the atom bomb. And you talk about this in your book, you know, simper symmetry, string theory, whatever. If we do have a theory of everything, what will it do for us? And some people say, well, like, it could unleash the equivalent of, you know, destructive power

on the earth that, you know, dynamite did compared to nuclear power, and then nuclear power compared to whatever the theory of everything will unlock. If you believe that is a possibility, like that merely the equations can actually lead to technology, I find them very separate. I find that distinction is very arbitrary. The people say, because we understood evolution, we now have CRISPR, I think they're very different.

Yeah. So I don't have to tell you here, right? Science is a lot messier than the textbook portrayal, right? And, you know, the wash, rinse, repeat kind of idea that we wake up in the morning, and the first thing we say to ourselves, today, what's my hypothesis, right? And off we go. We know that's not how it works. And we also know that, you know, the experimentalists, they tinker and they play and they try

and find things out. And it's a game at some level, right? But it's a – but it is a guided game in the sense that you do, look at what other people have done and you think about how I could push an experiment this way or that way, etc. So there is sort of a relationship there. I do think equations carry power in themselves in that, you know, right, and this is what I say to my students, you know, you may have experienced this. The transition of a student from like a student into a research student, when they stop, you know, they derive an equation, then give you the answer.

Right. But when they derive an equation and ask then what's the consequences of that equation, right? That's when they, you know, move into that research sort of area. Consequences come from examining the equations and some of those consequences can be good and some of those are not necessarily that good. E equals MC squared was definitely a driver in the development of nuclear physics. I think that's almost undoubted. But of course, at the time, even when E equals MC squared was published,

I think it was Rutherford who said that anyone who says that you could get usable power from an atom is talking moonshine, right? So different people have different interpretations, I guess, of how powerful an equation can be. But I think it can be motivated. But as I said, science is a bit of tinkering over here, a bit of maths over there. Sometimes it comes together.

Sometimes it doesn't. But it sort of all sort of heaves itself forward. Yeah, exactly. And I guess, you know, I always like to, you know, again, I want the readers to buy this book and read it in as many formats as possible. And I guess, you know, the question is not maybe where the universe is, you know, is coming from that has to be answered. And I think, you know, it's really that the title is really a descripto.

I mean, you go through here and you kind of, you know, kind of gave me flashbacks to high school chemistry. You know, you were going through a Huns rules and, you know, how do you get these, the different packings, but you go through in really delightful detail on how the universe is really assembled put together, if you will. And, and yet, I think you do make this convincing case that there's a lot left to be discovered and that we are kind of scratching the surface. And that, you know, to some people is depressing because so it's so much time. much money. It's so many people. We only have so much of all these things. And yet, there are still so many mysteries left to do. But I think that's also what makes it exciting. And I guess if I had to ask you, of the questions that you pose and sort of put forth here, you know, it's like children, you can never say, you know, which one's your favorite? But is there kind of a question, a bucket list question

that you would like to ask the Almighty or, you know, that you most are interested in understanding? I mean, you mentioned the weak force earlier, but could you put a spin on to, no pun intended, why that is and kind of what the most ultimate satisfaction for you would be to answer in your career or have answered in your career? Oh, so in my career, so we are talking about very, very earthly kind of things. So I guess one of my driving forces in my research is, you know, the dark side of the universe. That's the area that I think could be answered in my. lifetime, at least part of it, right? So we know that we have dark matter, we have dark energy,

and we've known about dark matter for rapidly approaching 100 years, if you look back as Wiki's original work. Dark energy, you know, theoretically for a bunch of years, but the last 20 years, something is out there. I think that given the effort around the globe trying to answer these questions, that we will come to some sort of a conclusion, least around dark matter, right? I mean, the particle physicists are going, you know, full guns, the astronomers and now the astro-particle physicists looking for signatures of what dark matter might be. Dark energy, I think, is going to be a tougher nut to crack. In that, all the, all the observations so far are pushing towards dark energy being maximally boring,

in the sense that it's looking more and more like Einstein's traditional cosmological constant. And if that's what it is, then it's some background to the universe that we're never going to get to play with. We're never going to get to manipulate. We're just going to have to shrug our shoulders and say, it's there. But people are really looking for any signature whatsoever. There's a deviation from that kind of simple picture. But the results are by the Pantheon people this week, we are heading towards a maximally boring universe. And that's actually one of my fears.

right? Because after you've nailed down the equation of state to five decimal places, how much further do you go, right? 1.0 0.000,000,000,000, what do you do at that point? And we're not there yet, but it just feels like we're going down that road. Yeah. Now that is true. And yeah, may it be, you know, maybe you live in boring times on earth at least, but perhaps cosmologically interesting times. So, we've reached the end of the scheduled conversation, but there is a bonus portion, which I like to call the thrilling three, the impossible questions, which I didn't ask you guys last time because it was two of you got. And I think it would be very difficult to ask two people, three questions each.

So I would like to ask you some existential questions about where you have come from and where you are going, if you don't mind. Let's go for it. All right. So the first question has to do with your near-term future, although I hope not for 80 years or so. And when you reach the biblical ordained maximal age, as we scientists know, that's when our lives come to an end at 120 when the rabbi Moses came to his end. He left an ethical will, kind of a bit of wisdom and intelligence. I see you as a seeker, as a thinker, not just kind of a technician. I think that you think big, big thoughts,

and that's the kind of guest I love to have on this podcast. I want to ask you this question. When you reach the biblical age of 120, what piece of wisdom, not monetary, not knowledge? What wisdom would you put in your ethical will to give as wisdom for future generations? Oh, what wisdom? Oh, my goodness.

I think my, my, my, my, there are two bits and pieces. Number one, I really think it's be kind. I don't care what your occupation is around and what country or clan you're claimed to be part of. I think be kind. And it's because I think we lose track of the fact that other people are people and they are dealing with their lives and nobody's life is simple. But the other is to be curious. I, again, I do sometimes worry about the state of not just scientific knowledge, but the approach to science by governments, and that sets the scientific knowledge. And this notion of being curious for curious sake to try and understand the deeper questions

about the universe, I think is very important. There is more to life than just developing the next widget, the next iPhone, the next iPad, answering these bigger questions, I think is something that should be our goal as human beings. You're speaking my language literally because the motto of my YouTube channel is ABC. Always be curious. All right, excellent. Okay. Now I want to go farther into the future.

And this is going to take us along the lines of Sir Arthur C. Clark's 2001, a space odyssey, where these monoliths make their appearance. I don't know if you've seen it or not. Oh, yes. Okay. So these, we don't know what they are. Maybe they're time capsules. Maybe they're warnings.

Maybe they're kind of, you know, someone's putting it there to brag. But I want to ask a question as if they're time capsules and ask you what you'd put in it, kind of a time capsule that you knew would last a billion years. And it's not too dissimilar from Richard Feynman's kind of what he called this cataclysm question. Like, what would you put, you know, what, what's word? what sentence contains the most information about the physical universe in the fewest possible words, so to speak? And he mentioned Adams. But I want to ask you, what would you put in a time capsule that summarizes everything we've learned about the cosmos? Not you specifically, but about

humankind as a whole. Oh, so again, that's a tricky question. That one is. I don't think I have a very simple answer to this. I think what, I think if I was going to leave a message to any future creature that found this capsule, I think it would be that we were proud that we've learned so much in such little time. And again, maybe we want a summary of what we know there. But I think the fact that us slightly evolved monkey brains have achieved so much in a few tens of thousands of years

is something that we should be proud of. And again, as Charlie Languver says, intelligence might be a rare thing in the universe and it might be that we are freaky that we've developed it's relatively fast. So yeah, I don't know if I could I could write anything down that a creature billions of years from now would go,

oh, I didn't know that. But I think I would write down something about being proud about what we have achieved. Wow. That's very beautiful. And speak for yourself when you talk about monkey brains. Okay. Last question has to do with you're not your future or the universe's future, but your past.

And this has to do with Sir Arthur C. Clark's so-called third law, which is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Of course, that's the name of my podcast origin into the impossible, which we take from Sir Arthur. I'd ask you what mysterious aspect of life, perhaps as a scientist or not, perplexed you as a 20-year-old, 30-year-old, what have you. But now makes kind of sense, looking back with the aid of time and space. What kind of advice might you give to that 20- or 30-year-old person to give him the courage to go into the impossible? Oh, again, another question that I don't know if I've, I don't know if I, I don't know it. if I've answered any of my questions that I had when I was a 20-year-old to do with life. I mean, as a young man, I was bothered by the questions.

I think that everyone's bothered by. I am still bothered by the existence of consciousness. And I don't know whether or not I should be bothered about. And the other one, of course, is pain. You know, when you realize that pain doesn't exist, right? It's not pain is not, you know, it's a signal, right? It's your interpretation of that. And you sort of that makes no sense to me in terms of evolution of why pain is what it is as a evolutionary survival thing. But then why other things feel painful, which don't necessarily help your

survival, again, is a little bit uncertain. Are you talking about faculty meetings? What are you talking about it? Yeah, I'm currently dealing with astropolitics at the moment and it's very painful. I don't know. I don't know. I think... Did you always know you want to know you wanted to be a scientist? No, I didn't. I almost fell into this role more than anything. I don't come from a scientific background. My father was a coal miner. I didn't know any scientists. I did enjoy science. And I guess one of the things that I would have told myself back then, is to understand that we really do not know everything.

Because often science was portrayed, you know, you watch a scientific documentary, you read an article in new scientists. Often it's about, oh, look, this is all the stuff we understand. And really what drives me on now, of course, is that stuff that we don't understand. And I would tell my younger stuff, no, to seek out what it is we don't know.

Don't just rely on what we're told we do know. Tell me, how did a coal miner's son grow up to be, you know, from Wales, grow up to be a professor and such a good communicator and writer especially. You're the only commonality between the two books of yours that I've read. Nothing against Luke or Chris, certainly, but you're the only common author between it. So how did a coal miner's son from South Wales become such an arreidite scholar? I was let's see I mean I went to high school and it was only in high school I discovered that I could do mathematics and I enjoyed physics and it was in high school my fellow students was starting to talk about going to university so I thought well maybe I should do that too and so I went off to university and I did physics and astronomy I thought I do physics because I could get a job somewhere and I did astronomy as a as as out of interest. And I did well.

And so, you know, as I approached the end of my degree, somebody said, oh, are you thinking of doing a PhD? And I went, I guess I am. And I applied to do a PhD. So there was never a grand plan. It was more of an amble and accidental paths than anything else. And yeah, I never planned to be a professor. They just randomly ended up at Cambridge and then,

Stony Brook, which is where I had, my origin story, but that's a tale for another podcast. Anyway, Jeremy, it's a thrill to talk to you. I hope we do get to meet when you come up over from down under. Perhaps this year will be the end of this pandemic and we'll be able to meet finally and maybe do a live podcast in person at some point. That would be a thrill. That would be wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much. So tell folks where they can find you on and about the internet. So I'm on Twitter at Cosmic underscore Horizons, and I have a web page www.garendfluis.com, but I'm happy to answer questions on Twitter or even

posted through the website. As long as they pass the rubric of your previous book. Garant, thank you so much. It's been a treat, and I hope we can meet up and do it again sometime soon. See you soon. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th,

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